Message: 1
Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2007 14:02:23 +0100
(BST)
From: Subbiah Arunachalam <
subbiah_a@yahoo.com>
Subject:
[LIS-Forum] Training in LIS
To:
lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in,
naglaxman@yahoo.com,
iatlis-owner@yahoogroups.comCc:
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Friends:
I am concerned about the
quality of training we
provide in our country to would be librarians
and
information scientists.
The other day I had received my copy of
the Bulletin
of ASIST, which I always find very readable. Prof.
Blaise
Cronin, who won the ASIS&T Award of Merit for
2006, had written a
two-page acceptance speech. He is
an extraordinarily good writer and I enjoy
reading
him. In his acceptance speech, Prof. Cronin, whom I
first came to
know more than two decades ago when I
reviewed his cute little book "The
Citation Process",
had mentioned the names of many outstanding
information
scientists, spanning more than two
generations, whose writings had shaped his
career or
influenced him in some way. Among them are
Hans Peter
Luhn
Robert Fairthorne
Cyril Cleerdon
Eugene Garfield
Wilfrid
Lancaster
Gerard Salton
Tefko Saracevic
Henry Small
Don
Swanson
Howard White
Bertram Brookes
Michael Buckland
Pauline
Autherton Cochrane
Wiliam Goffman
Belver Griffith
Robert Hayes
John
Martyn
Stephen Robertson
Karen Sparck Jones
Irene Farkas-Conn
Peter
Taylor
Alan Gilchrist
Elizabeth Lowry-Corry
Brian Vickery
Robert
Williams
Ben Ami-Lipetz
Derek de Solla Price
Nick Belkin
Boyd
Rayward
Jack Meadows.
I met a young librarian with a Masters degree
from a
leading Indian university and a couple of years of
work experience
and showed him the article and asked
him if he had read any of these authors.
He was honest
enough to admit that he had heard of the name of
Garfield in
connection with indexing, and his teachers
never even mentioned the names of
the others.
On another day I was asked to meet the final
year
Masters students of LIS in a famous Indian university.
Some students
would not speak a word, despite repeated
cajoling. Their knowledge was far
below what one would
expect of a Masters student. Without preparation,
they
may not be able to appreciate Tefko Saracevic's edited
volume
"Introduction to Information Science" or Irene
Farkas-Conn's history of the
field "From Documentation
to Information Science." To be fair, they
may
understand some portions of Garfield's Essays of an
Information
Scientist, as Garfield often wrote not for
the specialists but for the lay
readers.
Many years ago I was in a selection committee in a
chemistry
laboratory and I asked a candidate for the
post of an assistant librarian if
he knew any
chemistry as his job would be to serve chemists;
scientists
may want to make a substructure search and
unless one knows chemical
structures it will be almost
impossible to make such searches. The
candidate
replied that in the LIS school they taught
'organization of
knowledge' and therefore there was no
need to know chemistry! When asked to
explain 'open
access to journal literature' another candidate said
that
some libraries allowed users to move freely in
the library and pick up the
books and journals they
wanted to read, and he was totally ignorant of
making
journal literature freely available on the Internet.
I
have attended a few national conferences. There is
hardly any originality in
the papers presented and the
level of discussion is appallingly low.
We need to do something and do it quickly. We need to
inculcate the
habit of reading in our students. Blaise
cronin says that when he was a
graduate student at
Belfast he "poured over copies of
American
Documentation, Aslib Proceedings, IP&M, ARIST and the
Journal
of Documentation with enthusiasm of a kid in a
candy store, stumbling upon
seminal papers". We need
to guide our students to the masters and their
great
writings. As the field is expanding, the need to keep
abreast of
developments is becoming more and more
important. We need to improve the
communication skills
of our students. We should award degrees only to
the
deserving.
Years ago I had taught at the INSDOC Training
School
and I had the great pleasure of working with people
like Prof.
Thyaga Natarajan and Prof. Guha, and was
amazed at their simplicity and
passion for reading and
teaching. Even the next level faculty had
the
qualities of good teachers. I have heard about the
high quality of
training imparted at DRTC, but have no
first hand knowledge, except attending
a few
conferences and giving a few lectures to students. The
training
imparted at NCSI, largely thanks to the late
Dr T B Rajashekar, is indeed
very good. We need to
make sure that training imparted in every LIS
school
in the country is of the highest quality.
As Greg Chappell
said there should be a system where
those who do not perform are
automatically sent out.
According to him that is why Australia performs
very
well in cricket.
Best
wishes.
Arun